Creativity is a topic that is often neglected within mathematics teaching (Pehkonen, 1997). This neglect may well be related to the fact that there has been relatively little consideration of the concept of creativity within the area of mathematics education, even though the study of creativity in general in educational research has been highly fashionable since the 1950s (Haylock, 1987).
The purpose of this paper is to identify and classify local divergent thinking, which could be considered to contribute to the number and variety of children's responses, in order to foster children's creativity and creative thinking more effectively from the viewpoint of mathematics education. As Baer (1993) has stated that divergent thinking may play an important role in creative performance if one knows when to use it (p.69), there might be a necessity to consider divergent thinking as local thinking and to classify it, in order to make children be clearly aware when to apply it.
Four types of local divergent thinking that can be considered as different from each other are identified in this paper. They are the following.
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Divergent Perception: This type is the thinking activity for perceiving diverse attributes of the object at hand.
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Divergent Recollection: This type is the thinking activity for accessing to diverse knowledge by using the perceived attributes and accessed knowledge as a clue.
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Divergent Transformation: This type is the thinking activity for transforming the perceived attributes and accessed knowledge to diverse information.
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Divergent Connection: This type is the thinking activity for connecting perceived attributes and accessed knowledge to themselves in diverse ways.
Fig. 1: The Structure of Interrelationship between 4 types of Local Divergent Thinking
These types of local divergent thinking do not emerge independently throughout the total process of creative thinking, because they have complex structure of interrelationship (see Fig.1).
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